Dukepedia

The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?

Wikipedia is run by a phenomenon called the power law distribution. This is defined by a huge imbalance between participation. In the wikipedia example found in chapter five of Shirky's book, out of the 129 contributing writers for the page on asphalt, six of them can take credit for about a quarter of the edits. This means that the average user of wikipedia has very few edits. A local version of Wikipedia, lets call it Dukepedia, would compare on several levels to the worldwide version. Major trends would be similar whereas the sheer volume of entries would have to be smaller.
The phenomenon of the power law distribution would still take place within a smaller community like the JMU community. If it was narrowed down to one class on campus this theory would hold less true. Just a few students would make up for most of the articles. However there would be a variety of articles,  because of the variety of majors at this school. I personally may only write one article or edit a couple articles, whereas media, communications, and english majors may contribute more because it is something that they are interested in doing.
I feel that the quality of Dukepedia would be similar or comparable to that of Wikipedia. It does not take an expert in a certain field to write a quick article about a topic, especially when someone else can come later and add to it. It would take a while to catch on and really become reliable, but so did Wikipedia. Once it became known around campus people would want to join and put their two cents in. This would allow Dukepedia to get on Wikipedia's level, quality wise.
The main difference I see is the number of articles and number of contributers. The other possible problem is the type of article. Many topics are not relevant to a college atmosphere and would therefore most likely not be written. This is affected solely by the restrictions of a local community. More people in the community allows more people to edit and write more article. More writers would equal more articles. This creates a quality versus quantity argument in a way. Quality wise they would match up whereas quantity would suffer in the local version of Wikipedia.